“In that case,” Alleyn said, “why is one of the screws so tight, and only one wire shiny? We’ll keep this bell-push, Fox.”

He had wrapped his handkerchief round it and dropped it in his pocket, when the door was opened and Sonia Orrincourt walked in.

iv

She was dressed in black, but so dashingly that mourning was not much suggested. Her curtain of ashen hair and her heavy fringe were glossy, her eyelids were blue, her lashes incredible and her skin sleek. She wore a diamond clasp and bracelet and ear-rings. She stood just inside the room.

“Pardon the intrusion,” she said, “but am I addressing the police?”

“You are,” said Alleyn. “Miss Orrincourt?”

“That’s the name.”

“How do you do? This is Inspector Fox.”

“Now listen!” said Miss Orrincourt, advancing upon them with a professional gait. “I want to know what’s cooking in this icehouse. I’ve got my rights to look after, same as anybody else, haven’t I?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Thank you. Very kind I’m sure. Then perhaps you’ll tell me who asked you into my late fiancé’s room and just what you’re doing now you’ve got there.”

“We were asked by his family and we’re doing a job of work.”

“Work? What sort of work? Don’t tell me the answer to that one,” said Miss Orrincourt angrily. “I seem to know it. They’re trying to swing something across me. Is that right? Trying to pack me up. What is it? That’s what I want to know. Come on. What is it?”

“Will you first of all tell me how you knew we were here and why you thought we were police officers?”

She sat on the bed, leaning back on her hands, her hair falling vertically from her scalp. Behind her was spread the crimson counterpane. Alleyn wondered why she had ever attempted to be an actress while there were magazine artists who needed models. She looked in a leisurely manner at Fox’s feet. “How do I know you’re police? That’s a scream! Take a look at your boy friend’s boots.”

“Yours, partner,” Alleyn murmured, catching Fox’s eye.

Fox cleared his throat. “Er—touché,” he said carefully. “Not much good me trying to get by with a sharp-eyed young lady, is it, sir?”

“Well, come on,” Miss Orrincourt demanded. “What’s the big idea? Are they trying to make out there’s something funny in the Will? Or what? What are you doing, opening my late fiancé’s drawers? Come on?”

“I’m afraid,” said Alleyn, “you’ve got this situation the wrong way round. We’re on a job, and part of that job is asking questions. And since you’re here, Miss Orrincourt, I wonder if you’d mind answering one or two?”

She looked at him, he thought, as an animal or a completely unselfconscious child might look at a stranger. It was difficult to expect anything but perfect sounds from her. He experienced a shock each time he heard the Cockney voice with its bronchial overtones, and the phrases whose very idiom seemed shoddy, as if she had abandoned her native dialect for something she had half-digested at the cinema.

“All upstage and county?” she said. “Fancy! And what were you wanting to know?”

“About the Will, for instance.”

“The Will’s all right,” she said quickly. “You can turn the place inside out. Crawl up the chimney if you like. You won’t find another Will. I’m telling you, and I know.”

“Why are you so positive?”

She had slipped back until she rested easily on her forearm. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll tell you. When I came in here last thing that night, my fiancé showed it to me. He’d had old Rattisbon up and a couple of witnesses and he’d signed it. He showed me. The ink was still wet. He’d burnt the old one in the fireplace there.”

“I see.”

“And he couldn’t have written another one even if he’d wanted to. Because he was tired and his pain was bad and he said he was going to take his medicine and go to sleep.”

“He was in bed when you visited him?”

“Yes.” She waited for a moment, looking at her enamelled finger-nails. “People seem to think I’ve got no feelings, but I’ve been very upset. Honestly. Well, he was sweet. And when a girl’s going to be married and everything’s marvellous it’s a terrible thing for this to happen, I don’t care what any one says.”

“Did he seem very ill?”

“That’s what everybody keeps asking. The doctor and old Pauline and Milly. On and on. Honestly, I could scream. He just had one of his turns and he felt queer. And with the way he’d eaten and thrown a temperament on top of it, no wonder. I gave him his hot drink and kissed him nighty-nighty and he seemed all right and that’s all I know.”

“He drank his hot milk while you were with him?”

She swung over a little with a luxurious movement and looked at him through narrowed eyes. “That’s right,” she said. “Drank it and liked it.”

“And his medicine?”

“He poured that out for himself. I told him to drink up like a good boy, but he said he’d wait a bit and see if his tummy wouldn’t settle down without it. So I went.”

“Right. Now, Miss Orrincourt,” said Alleyn, facing her with his hands in his pockets, “you’ve been very frank. I shall follow your example. You want to know what we’re doing here. I’ll tell you. Our job, or a major part of it, is to find out why you played a string of rather infantile practical jokes on Sir Henry Ancred and let it be thought that his granddaughter was responsible.”

She was on her feet so quickly that he actually felt his nerves jump. She was close to him now; her under-lip jutted out and her brows, thin hairy lines, were drawn together in a scowl. She resembled some drawing in a man’s magazine of an infuriated baggage in a bedroom. One almost expected some dubious caption to issue in a balloon from her lips.

“Who says I did it?” she demanded.

“I do, at the moment,” Alleyn said. “Come now. Let’s start at Mr. Juniper’s shop. You bought the Raspberry there, you know.”

“The dirty little so-and-so,” she said meditatively. “What a pal! And what a gentleman, I don’t suppose.”

Alleyn ignored these strictures upon Mr. Juniper. “Then,” he said, “there’s that business about the paint on the banisters.”

Obviously this astonished her. Her face was suddenly bereft of expression, a mask with slightly dilated eyes. “Wait a bit,” she said. “That’s funny!”

Alleyn waited.

“Here!” she said. “Have you been talking to young Ceddie?”

“No.”

“That’s what you say,” she muttered, and turned on Fox. “What about you, then?”

“No, Miss Orrincourt,” said Fox blandly. “Not me or the Chief Inspector.”

“Chief Inspector!” she said. “Coo!”

Alleyn saw that she was looking at him with a new interest and had a premonition of what was to come.

“That’d be one of the high-ups, wouldn’t it? Chief Inspector who? I don’t seem to have caught the name.”

Any hopes he may have entertained that his connection with Troy was unknown to her vanished when she repeated his name, clapped her hand over her mouth and ejaculating “Coo! That’s a good one,” burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

“Pardon me,” she said presently, “but when you come to think of it it’s funny. You can’t get away from it, you know, it’s funny. Seeing it was her that — Well, of course! That’s how you knew about the paint on the banisters.”

“And what,” Alleyn asked, “is the connection between Sir Cedric Ancred and the paint on the banisters?”

“I’m not going to give myself away,” said Miss Orrincourt, “nor Ceddie either, if it comes to that. Ceddie’s pretty well up the spout anyway. If he’s let me down he’s crazy. There’s a whole lot of things I want to know first. What’s all this stuff about a book? What’s the idea? Is it me, or is it everybody else in this dump that’s gone hay-wire? Look! Somebody puts a dirty little book in a cheese-dish and serves it up for lunch. And when they find it, what do these half-wits do? Look at me as if I was the original hoodunit. Well, I mean to say, it’s silly. And what a book! Written by somebody with a lisp and what about? Keeping people fresh after they’re dead. Give you the willies. And when I say I never put it in the cheese-dish what do they do? Pauline starts tearing herself to shreds and Dessy says, ‘We’re not so foolish as to suppose you’d want to run your head in a noose,’ and Milly says she happens to know I’ve read it, and they all go out as if I was something the cat’d brought in, and I sit there wondering if it’s me or all of them who ought to be locked up.”